A couple weeks ago, I was talking to a colleague about how her students were going to present their research. Her concern was that they didn't want to do presentations in front of each other. She also didn't want them to be text heavy slideshows which is what high school student want to do. I suggested Adobe Spark. It would be more visual, they wouldn't have to do class presentations. They could share in small groups and respond to each other that way.
I said I was pretty sure I could get them going on it and it should be easy. I did a practice one just to make sure it worked both on the chrome books and iPads/iPhones. I recorded my voice - I hated it, but got over it. I sent it to the colleague to make sure students would be able to share them with her. I told her she didn't need to actually listen to it. She did and said it didn't sound like me. I listened again. I felt that if I was going to encourage students to record their voices I had to figure out what I thought was wrong with mine. Then I listened to some other people who recorded their voices: Brenda on her weekly messages to us, a couple podcasts, some vloggers... I decided that I sounded too formal and stiff. I needed to sound like I was actually talking to a person. When I talked to the students about recording their voices I encouraged them to think about talking to an individual. Allowing themselves to engage with the material and sound excited about it.
After that we had to do our screencast to our part 1 selves. I tried to take my own advice and even though I still felt funny sitting in a room by myself sounding engaging, I think it turned out better than my Spark video. I didn't allow myself to keep doing it looking for perfection. I just did the best I could in the six takes that I did. (Six isn't crazy is it?) Then I stopped.
Lisa,
ReplyDeleteI loved your screencast, and I think it definitely sounded like you - which always means clear, articulate, well paced and interesting in my opinion! I find it really hard to watch or listen to myself as well, and I have had to do a lot of work to reduce the amount of times I have to redo something. As you mention...the many takes are really difficult! If we compare this to the revision on a text document, where we can revisit and make little tweaks and additions, it seems much easier to deal with text - at least in the digital age that might be true. I can remember the days of re-writing when that actually meant RE-WRITING and, remember white out? Those days seem like ancient times!
My advice would be that the more you do it, the more natural it will seem, and that your students will appreciate you putting yourself out there in order to build relationships with them, more than they will care about mistakes on video or audio.
Another thought might be to play around with YouTube editor or GarageBand or Audacity (I still love that one). What I usually do is have a bit of an outline beside me, and as long as you pause to take a breath in between sections (which is easy to cut right out later) then when you make a mistake you can just take a breath and begin a retake. One thing that my husband shared with me (because it's related to radio recording) is that if you smile when you talk, it sounds more enthusiastic. Let me know what you think of that one!
I wonder if others who do this kind of production use a lot of editors?